AMD announces new driver initiative, will retire Catalyst software

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Roughly six weeks ago, AMD announced a major reorganization of its graphics business. The newly named Radeon Technologies Group is headed by Raja Koduri and reports directly to Lisa Su. At the time, AMD told us it has major changes planned for its driver and software stack, and we’re seeing the first of those updates announced today. AMD is launching a new version of its driver control software and retiring the Catalyst brand.

AMD is calling this new software suite “Radeon Software Crimson Edition.” As brand initiatives go it’s…. well, honestly, it’s pretty terrible. Radeon is a hardware brand, not a software stack. AMD and ATI have used the color red as their defining characteristic for roughly 20 years, which makes “Crimson” rather derivative. Including the word “Edition” makes it sound as though there are going to be multiple versions of the software — should we look forward to “Mauve”, or perhaps “Taupe?”

Dubious branding aside, everyone is going to call this software suite Crimson, so that’s the nomenclature we’ll use for the rest of the article.We apologize for the less-than-perfect settings screenshots — we’re capturing slides for this article, which means the displayed UI elements were a touch blurred to start with. All images can be enlarged.

The goals of Radeon Crimson

The point of Crimson is to meaningfully move the ball compared to the features and capabilities Nvidia exposes in its own software. AMD is claiming that this new suite is a ground-up rewrite of the entire system in Qt. Currently the Crimson framework is Windows-only, though AMD will likely port it to Linux at some point. AMD is claiming that QT slashes Catalyst’s start-up speed, from an average of 8 seconds on an AMD E-350 to just 0.6 seconds with Crimson. That’s significantly faster than even Nvidia’s Control Panel, and it would be a huge UI improvement to Catalyst.

One of the other major goals of the new drivers is to offer users much better fine-grained control over game settings and options. This has historically been an area where AMD lagged Nvidia, but hopefully no longer. Users will be able to create profiles for individual titles, as shown above. In a first for either company, AMD will also offer per-game overclocking support, with individual user-created profiles for these modes as well:

Exactly which features will be folded into game profiles is still a matter of conjecture. In the past, third-party software like Radeon Pro could enable features that AMD had left off the table, but that software has been moribund for the past two years and to the best of our knowledge, nothing has replaced it. Hopefully we’ll see advanced feature integration and the ability to set custom MSAA levels or equivalent tweaks from directly within the driver.

AMD is also emphasizing a new Eyefinity setup mode that’s meant to simplify and streamline the multi-monitor setup process and to make it easier to use advanced functions like FreeSync or video processing. This is another area where improvements could be made — the Catalyst Control Panel may have evolved acceptably well, but it was no triumph of UI engineering and graphics cards have become much more complex than they used to be. The new Crimson software will also check for driver updates and won’t require registration in order to do so.

AMD isn’t planning to ditch its Gaming Evolved (aka Raptr) application any time soon, so users hoping to see integrated video recording in a single application are out-of-luck. Raptr will remain AMD’s answer to GeForce Experience for the foreseeable future. Crimson will scan for titles automatically and populate your list of installed games, but it’s not clear that the driver performs any kind of one-button optimizations (those features are presumably reserved for the Gaming Evolved app).

A (maybe) great start

We’re glad to see AMD committing to improving its driver software, though we’ll withhold judgment until we actually see the final product. What’s more important is that this first set of changes showcase further driver improvements through 2016. While DX12 changes the nature of game optimization, driver support for DX11 titles will continue to matter for years to come, and AMD has historically lagged Nvidia in this arena.

AMD has said that Crimson will be available to download before the end of the year — calling the last major Catalyst push “Omega” ended up being a little more accurate than we may have thought 12 months ago.

Tagged In

AMD finally admitting their software stack was a pile. Took them long enough.

Daniel Anderson

Yeah, thank goodness they took care of the GUI, I mean its not like the drivers themselves with the higher CPU overhead or the lack of the DX11 DCL’s or ODD eyefinity/multimonitor bugs are an issue. The fact they got a new GUI is really refreshing.

nvidia now only has a significantly lower cpu usages on a few selected games they optimized the hell out of (a model that just isn’t sustainable, and wasted effort with dx12 so close).

Daniel Anderson

I disagree. 29% is not significant. AMD’s lack of support for DX11 multithreading features, or the DCL’s that go along with DX11 is significant due to the titles that are still to be released, and titles of years passed that still use DX11. Free performance due to software alteration. I can’t seem to find anything regarding the GPU driver optimization expert that AMD hired some 8 months ago, which leads me we haven’t been able to see what he’s been able to accomplish. Fingers crossed for the cimson update (new nomenclature for OMEGA). The individual AMD hired to further optimize drivers cause they actually know that their drivers have poor performance and by alleviating the bottleneck will only make their hardware look that much better for PR purposes.

The_Countess

“29% is not significant.”

wtf are you talking about not significant. that’s a 50% increase in throughput in cpu limited situations right there.

games from ‘years passed’ don’t support dx11 multithreading, and don’t need it either on todays hardware, so that’s a none issue.

then there is the fact that AMD HARDWARE is more multithreaded then nvidia’s and that creates more driver overhead in order to cram it into a mostly single threaded dx11 world. AMD hardware is forward looking, while nvidia’s is backwards looking. that’s a advantage for nvidia this year, but will mean their current cards will go obsolete faster then AMD’s with future dx12 games.

Daniel Anderson

Well I’m glad AMD’s hardware is forward thinking and doesn’t rely on software what-so-ever to utilize it. I mean whats a driver used for anyway.

Explain to me how 29% gets boosted to 50% and why they shouldn’t attempt to improve beyond that at any point and time?

Granted it states the 29% figure was for APU’s alone, 19% for R series GPU’s although also carries 15% more CPU performance related to the driver. However nothing of the sort is listed for 15.7/15.7.1. https://community.amd.com/thread/184633

The engines that run the games will also run vulkan, which even my HD 5850 will be supported by vulkan (OpenGL 4.3 is the minimum required).

The_Countess

google AMD 15.7 driver overhead

plenty of results of people with lower end CPU’s getting very nice boots to performance in the driver overhead benchmark.

Daniel Anderson

Showing at most a 30% increase in draw calls (which does not automatically mean improved performance). Which isn’t bad, however considering its less than half of what a 980 can produce in the same test I’m not sure that they shouldn’t continue to improve their driver by cutting driver overhead and adding dx11 DCL’s, just proves they still need more work. Are you really that content with inefficient software holding back hardware?

” Are you really that content with inefficient software holding back hardware?”

no, which is why DX11 needs to go as fast as possible. and while nvidia screwed around in the margins to improve the inefficient mess that is DX11, AMD was working on a REAL solution.

more drawcall does mean a reduction in driver overhead. if a game doesnt request more drawcall (because games try their hardest to reduce them because, again, dx11 is a mess) that still means a reduction in CPU overhead which comes to the forground in CPU limited situations.

Daniel Anderson

You realize you got the Nvidia vs AMD thing wrong right? Nvidia’s DX11 DCL’s is why nvidia has performed so much better. They haven’t had to optimize for higher draw calls cause they already were present. Again, higher draw calls doesn’t equal performance gain if the GPU cannot handle it, which was explained in the link I provided before.

As whats typically understood is that AMD does have hardware with a great amount of brute force, however seeing NVIDIA is more software laden, they rely on optimized software to keep their stuff humming along.

ROdNEY

There is only one game that supports DX11 MT and that is CIV5, and in this game AMD actually supports it! IT is not supported generally on driver level. But the reason is very simply because it is a pointless feature to support. AMD answered with MANTLE which not only offer proper MultiThreading but is superior to DX11 in every other way.

Daniel Anderson

Aye however thats been put on hold for vulkans release, even then the effects of mantle were negligible when using an Intel processor + AMD GPU (DX12, AMD sees a much larger boost when using a Intel processor). DX12 they also have all requried DCL’s in place which is why they see a pretty large boost vs Nvidia. Nvidia has had the crown for some time for efficiency (perf/watt; AMD $/watt). The reason being is because they had the DCL’s in place for DX11 by the time the first DX11 game was released. Took them 2 years to implement, AMD being late to the game never started. With AMD’s GPU’s as powerful as they are,t hey’ve been able to keep up, however with DX11 DCL’s in place, I wouldn’t think it to be illogical to believe that the efficiency of the GPU’s could be increased by not having to use brute force to get those FPS’s as high as they are. I haven’t read anything stating theres an architectural problem as to why AMD GPU’s typically run hotter, just software inefficiencies related to the lack of the DCL’s.

You can see it provides just about the same boost that DX12 is expected to (without Async support). +20 FPS to 570 from 40 fps to 60fps. To me this doesn’t seem insignificant. I believe they should revisit the DCL’s in the future considering there will still be DX11 games released, and I’m into efficiency.

ROdNEY

People very wrongly assume that DirectX overhead is only related to a driver layer. This is indeed very wrong assumption. GCN, from architectural point, is much harder to optimize for this obsolete single-threaded focused API and GCN is multi-threaded on hardware level. That’s why the GCN is much better for new APIs and the reason why AMD brought MANTLE instead of pointless DirectX overhead optimizations in the first place. GCN was simply made with focus for low level APIs, which no optimization can ever match. And which put developers back into driver’s seat.

Daniel Anderson

I don’t see DirectX to be pointless. Mantle is basically the opposite of DX12. Dx12 see’s a huge boost for AMD GPU’s when coupled with an intel I7. However Mantle see’s no benefit unless coupled with an I3 or FX83XX and below. With DX12 going to be the standard, especially with it reportedly being ported to the console with Vulkan picking up mantles pieces theres no reason they cannot live in harmony and serve different purposes (multi API choice in games).

Just by what Mantle has shown us thus far, if Zen is the savior AMD is hoping for, Mantle will have even less useless than it was before (given AMD’s marketshare) and can only hope additions with Vulkan will supplement where Mantle lacks.

namco

Yeah because Nvidia software is soooooooooo much better <_<

Kyle

“AMD isn’t planning to ditch its
Gaming Evolved (aka Raptr) application any time soon, so users hoping to
see integrated video recording in a single application are out-of-luck.”

Correct me if I’m wrong, but I was under the impression that the Gaming Evolved application was mostly handled by a separate company. Does anyone happen to know what sort of duration they have on their arrangement?

Daniel Anderson

No idea, but for those that loved RadeonPRO, the developer of that application is one of the devs of Raptr. Downsampling, Video Recording (used to include 5k/6k) were all working in RadeonPRO and ported to RAPTR.

Hardware_Hoshi

Some sites claim the Gaming Evolved App by Raptr will be somehow intgrated into the new AMD ‘Radeon Software’ UI. I bet it is some sort of interface between AMD and Raptr servers. It came at the end of 2014, so the duration of the agreement should be at least few more years.

Otherwise the effort for all the programming would be in vain too soon.

powerwiz

For myself I’ve used both Nvidia and AMD. Currently GTX980s power my rig. The thing I find amazing about AMD is since I have been alive there always having some sort of shuffle, losing money, layoff’s etc.

Just another say of drama at AMD..yawn.

The_Countess

yes that’s what happens when your main competitor is a decades long monopoly abuser.

the fact that out of the 14 companies with a x86 licence, AMD is the only company left is a testament to their strength, resilience and adaptability. everyone else is either bankrupt, or left the x86 market completely in the face of intel’s abuses.

3R45U5

amd did contribute to their situation as well, it is not just intel being a gigantic bully (which they are).
i think it was actually joel that did a very insightful article on this topic here on xtremtech, i am trying to find it.

sure AMD made mistakes, but if Intel hadn’t caused them to live on the financial edge most of the time they would have easily been able to absorb those mistakes, or even fix them by throwing money at the problem.

just imagine the market today if Intel hadn’t scared away investors at AMD and AMD would have been able to build their second factory before the launch of the k8. with just 1 factory they could supply enough CPU’s to get 20% marketshare, with 2 factories they could have gotten 40%.

40% markets share would have meant tripple or even quadruple the profits. overspending on ATI wouldn’t have caused anywhere near the same amount of issues. with 2 factories and more profits their R&D spending on new production processes could have increased. building a 3de factory after having 2 is much easier then making a second.

and with chip fabrication all about having many factories to get the 1 time investment in a new production process to pay off, that would have RADICALLY altered the game for AMD.

in short we would have a far healthier CPU market today. and the fact we don’t starts with Intel’s monopoly abuse.

ROdNEY

Intel made some mistakes too, P4 story was a disaster. Athlon 64 was superior to P4 and AMD still haven’t made much of a profit in that era. because Intel has been using unfair business practices. But most people want monopoly, so there is obviously no problem there.

Plyphon

“New Brushed Metal Design”

Let’s hope that list isn’t a priority roadmap.

uzer

Forgot I have this site bookmarked, its been a while. Very slow loading website packed with uhmm akamai? etc redirected trackers or such? (blocked), thin strip of text down the centre of the screen with vast whitespace either side (ads i presume?), sparse list of articles on the front page side (now down to 3?), and back to endorsing Lenovo yet again…

Used to love this place for big sci/tech news. Yep, bye. :/

Natan

Get out before you see how awful their comment moderation is

Joel Hruska

I do not endorse Lenovo. Ads and content are separate.

Uncle_Fred

The site is covered in a ads. A couple weeks ago they added a ton of new ads all over the site, it took us a few hours on the easylist adblock forums to push out an update to block it all for adblock and ublock users.

Rawr

You know you could easily do that with block element. Besides, Joel or whoever it was did a nice article covering these adblock varieties and its performance. It scares me to see that it has to block 46 instances on ET alone lol… Sometimes I see some sites hit up to 76 blocked. It’s the new age of revenue where they slap as much ads on screen and slow your browsing experience to a scrawl just so you can read a few headlines.

Actually Extremetech is very sneaky. The ads use a script that assigns random numbers to the ads. In order to block them this way, you have to block the actual website content too. We got around this on the easylist forums but it took some time.

Phobos

Can’t they just leave the name alone? And I’m guessing that will only benefit for those who have new OS and hardware.

prtskrg

No, it’s for all.

rrstuv

AMD still dominates scientific computing!

Hardware_Hoshi

Yes, from the bottum up! ;)

Perseus Smith

Do you do any scientific computing yourself Hardware_Hoshi? If so, then you are aware of NVIDIA’s horrible double precision performance, look at the Titan Z vs AMD 280x

Hardware_Hoshi

I really hate pseudo scientists. Why would you favor higher double precision and then go for minimal capacity non ECC graphic cards / accelerators? The DP was moved to the TESLA series and the Quadros were focused more into the direction of CAD, neural Network and general CUDA calculations. We will have to see how much upcoming Pascal / Volta models change this.

AMD does not win anything here. The reason is their horrible Linux / Unix support. Especially their OpenGL still runs abysmal as ever. The majority of the scientists don’t use Windows, you know. The driver support was always the weak point of AMD. In the professional world the focus is on top-notch drivers and 24/7 support, which AMD never delivered. The Support is what the business people actually pay for. Don’t you wonder why AMD had to lower the prices for their professional cards to half of Nvidia offers? So that someone actually buys them!!!! Hardware is replaced in regular intervalls, but the Software stays for a very long time.

Now AMD changes the driver model and everyone hopes this will fix the issues. If this new Radeon Software is Windows only, nothing will change on the scientific front.

Rawr

I’m banking on this. Nvidia had a lot to learn from the ashes of singularity DX12 battle of the cards or the combination of the two benchmarking.

Hardware_Hoshi

In the IT-business you always have to learn. No product is perfect without alot of work. Nvidia does this almost fanatically. If there is a problem, they send their guys to fix it. That is the difference in mentality. At AMD there is no such behavior visable.

Although the Radeons have a few flaws, they are actually stronger than the Geforce equivalents in the hardware in regards of theoretical raw performance. What brings down those cards below their cabability is the weak software implementation. Especially the AMD drivers used to drag down the performance very much every time.

This is one of the banes for the Fury (Fiji) chips as an example. Their performance is very inconsistant. Sometimes it battles against their direct competitor, then they suddenly fight in lower brackets than they are priced at. Such a situation would not happen if the software guys had enough manpower and ressources to actually do their job properly without forced improvisation all the time.

The_Countess

scientists usually aren’t interested in openGL performance.

Hardware_Hoshi

If you work inside an OS where OpenGL is the main input for every graphical environment, you are usually interested. Don’t forget OpenGL is still used as an industrial standard too.

The_Countess

except that 2d performance isn’t a problem.

Hardware_Hoshi

Computing is more than just number crunching. Many scientific simulations have need for graphical output at some point.

The_Countess

then you’re talking about subset of scientific users already.

and the output they have is generally very basic. it doesn’t use advanced shaders ect like games do. so again, no performance issues there.

beside that, the number crunching and the display do not need to be handled by the same GPU.. or even the same computer. and very often aren’t.

Hardware_Hoshi

“then you’re talking about subset of scientific users already.”

–> It even got a term: ‘Visual computing’. If you don’t use advanced shaders for this, you are doing something wrong.

The output device could still be in need to use OpenGL. AMD is out of the game here because their OpenGL performance is abysmal since forever. Their drivers are at fault and need to be adressed more than some GUI.

The_Countess

investing in openGL right before vulkan makes openGL utterly obsolete is a waste of time.

” It even got a term: ‘Visual computing’.”

a even smaller subset.

and you misunderstand. using shaders isn’t a problem with AMD on openGL. its only with the highly complex ones used in games that issues arise. furthermore the problems happen only when real time feedback is important. like in games.

very very few scientific GPGPU projects have that requirement.

Busybee

Nopes, just look at HPC and supercomputer markets nowadays as they are mostly dominated by Intel, Nvidia and IBM. For example http://www.top500.org/blog/lists/2015/06/press-release/ quotes “Fifty-two (52) of these use NVIDIA chips, four use ATI Radeon, and there are now 33 systems with Intel MIC technology (Xeon Phi)”…

rrstuv

Do you do any sci-comp? I do, and AMD has the best performance for double precision, although the efficiency isn’t as good as NVIDIA.

Nvidia’s CUDA native API is the most popular in GPGPU-assisted scientific computing nowadays. AMD’s Stream Computing API unfortunately isn’t that popular. Alternatively there’s also OpenCL API which caters to all GPGPUs. However optimizations under OpenCL for Nvidia’s GPGPU is different from AMD’s GPGPU as they have their unique traits. Nvidia enjoys a huge dominance with their professional GPGPUs, for example: http://www.kitguru.net/components/graphic-cards/anton-shilov/nvidia-tesla-is-dominating-the-market-of-hpc-accelerators/ quotes “Intel, Nvidia and AMD will remain the main vendors offering accelerator products for the HPC market. In 2014, Nvidia enjoyed a dominant market share with 85% of the accelerator market, according to Intersect 360 Research. While Nvidia’s Tesla outsells competing products, Intel’s Xeon Phi is also gaining traction”…

onstrike112

It’s nice to see that Catalyst will be getting better. It was already far better in my experience than Nvidia Control Panel, so if AMD can make this work, it’ll put them miles ahead of Nvidia in terms of software, which they already were a little bit already to me.

Christopher Wortman

They should do the smart thing and release the source code under gpl and allow us to fix the driver. It would be free to do. They could cut developer costs. And we would have a good working driver. Everyone would be happier.

AlbiteTwins

“AMD isn’t planning to ditch its
Gaming Evolved (aka Raptr) application any time soon, so users hoping to
see integrated video recording in a single application are out-of-luck.”

That’s extremely disappointing. It’s such a shame that AMD has to still rely on Raptr. Unlike GeForce Experience, Raptr is a third party company that has to make its money off it’s users.

prtskrg

It hasn’t been written on extremetech but Raptr’s functions will be brought in Radeon software so that all the functions are in one place. I think it was written so in ars technica’s article.

prtskrg

It’s called ‘crimson edition’ because Radeon software for 2015 is named so. In 2016 it’ll be another shade of red.

Kwuarter

Still better then GameWorks.

Harrison Ford

This is actually a good move, a long overdue move, but good. Indeed the Omega name of the 14.12 drivers was kinda prescient. People laugh and scoff at rewriting something like this, the current Catalyst works, things could still be bolted on it… but a startup time of less than a second, well I’m sold. AMD Crimson works for me, the rest I’ll forget exists. So will most people, I suspect.

seansplayin

I never understood why everyone hated on AMD’s driver’s. I switched to AMD like 3 years back and I’ve never had any problems. Even when I built a mining Farm on Linux (Ubuntu) it all just worked. IDK

The Watson

Within a few days of reading this, Nvidia released a knock off! Apparently nv forgot to tweak the loading times. I uninstalled the “GeForce Experience”, because my 560Ti was too old! Sad the old cheap 610 plain is supported, with less cores!

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